The 100 W-class ISCT100-v2 Hall Thruster (HT) has been characterized in terms of far-field plume properties. By means of a Faraday Cup and a Retarding Potential Analyzer, both the ion current density and the ion energy distribution function have been measured over a 180 ∘ circular arc for different operating points. Measurements are compared to far-field plume characterizations performed with higher power Hall thrusters. The ion current density profiles remain unchanged whatever the HT input power, although an asymptotic limit is observed in the core of the plume at high discharge voltages and anode mass flow rates. In like manner, the ion energy distribution functions reveal that most of the beam energy is concentrated in the core of the plume [ − 40 ∘ ; 40 ∘ ] . Moreover, the fraction of low energy ion populations increases at large angles, owing to charge exchange and elastic collisions. Distinct plume regions are identified; they remain similar to the one described for high-power HTs. An efficiency analysis is also performed in terms of current utilization, mass utilization, and voltage utilization. The anode efficiency appears to be essentially affected by a low voltage utilization, the latter originating from the large surface-to-volume ratio inherent to low-power HTs. Experimental results also show that the background pressure clearly affects the plume structure and content.

Abstract:Freshwater ecosystems contribute to many ecosystem services, many of which are being threatened by human activities such as land use change, river morphological changes, and climate change. Many disciplines have studied the processes underlying freshwater ecosystem functions, ranging from hydrology to ecology, including water quality, and a panoply of models are available to simulate their behaviour. This understanding is useful for the prediction of ecosystem services, but the model outputs must go beyond the production of time-series of biophysical variables, and must facilitate the beneficial use of the information it contains about the ecosystem services it describes. This article analyses the literature of ad hoc approaches that aim at quantifying one or more freshwater ecosystem services. It identifies the strategies adopted to use disciplinary-specific models for the prediction of the services. This review identifies that hydrological, water quality, and ecological models form a valuable knowledge base to predict changes in ecosystem conditions, but challenges remain to make proper and fruitful use of these models. In particular, considerations of temporal and spatial scales could be given more attention in order to provide better justifications for the choice of a particular model over another, including the uncertainty in their predictions.

Abstract. The ecological integrity of freshwater ecosystems is intimately linked to natural fluctuations in the river flow regime. In catchments with little human-induced alterations of the flow regime (e.g. abstractions and regulations), existing hydrological models can be used to predict changes in the local flow regime to assess any changes in its rivers' living environment for endemic species. However, hydrological models are traditionally calibrated to give a good general fit to observed hydrographs, e.g. using criteria such as the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) or the Kling–Gupta efficiency (KGE). Much ecological research has shown that aquatic species respond to a range of specific characteristics of the hydrograph, including magnitude, frequency, duration, timing, and the rate of change of flow events. This study investigates the performance of specially developed and tailored criteria formed from combinations of those specific streamflow characteristics (SFCs) found to be ecologically relevant in previous ecohydrological studies. These are compared with the more traditional Kling–Gupta criterion for 33 Irish catchments. A split-sample test with a rolling window is applied to reduce the influence on the conclusions of differences between the calibration and evaluation periods. These tailored criteria are shown to be marginally better suited to predicting the targeted streamflow characteristics; however, traditional criteria are more robust and produce more consistent behavioural parameter sets, suggesting a trade-off between model performance and model parameter consistency when predicting specific streamflow characteristics. Analysis of the fitting to each of 165 streamflow characteristics revealed a general lack of versatility for criteria with a strong focus on low-flow conditions, especially in predicting high-flow conditions. On the other hand, the Kling–Gupta efficiency applied to the square root of flow values performs as well as two sets of tailored criteria across the 165 streamflow characteristics. These findings suggest that traditional composite criteria such as the Kling–Gupta efficiency may still be preferable over tailored criteria for the prediction of streamflow characteristics, when robustness and consistency are important.

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